Op Hunt saboteur: going under

Where’s my pyjama t shirt? Mum’s ironed one pair of spotted pyjamas she wants me to take but, I never iron pyjamas. I don’t like that horrid little girl pink of the t shirt, nor the little girl hearts on the bottoms. What’s that about? Will the t shirt go over my head after the op?

Have I got a sore throat? I feel a bit chesty too, maybe a cold. If I say nothing will it be okay? But of course I’ve been feeling like this since October, that getting a cold ache and tug as I inhale. Nothing new.

Washing my hands I think of bugs on the towel and grab a fresh one. I used the phone, that must be crawling with microscopic life. I go and wipe it. Infection control training, a necessary annual annoyance at work, does stick. I was always careful at work of course, primarily because you’re routinely making interventions such as intravenous cannulation where you can introduce pathogens straight into the blood stream. There are also many immune compromised people, and it’s easy to start spreading their nasties to others. But it’s only in the past few weeks that this concern has built into my own life now I’m taking steroids which makes me more liable to infection. I grew up outdoors, covered in mud, drinking unpasteurised milk often straight from the cow. I take the view that we all live in balance, including with the microbiomes that live within us. But not today.

Mum keeps asking have you got your…let me get that, don’t do that I’ll do it… my inner crocodile appears. Bun aka Sausage is most upset this morning. She knows.

There in the back of my brain, is the tangible presence of my tumour, the knowledge of the op, the potentials for what Hunt will turn out to be… but whatever that is, it already is. It’s just that I don’t know who this bogeyman is, what he’s doing to do to me later on, whether he’ll leave a lingering whiff of aftershave or a large spillage and nothing will get rid of the smell.

I want coffee, I want breakfast. At last it’s 10 o clock and we leave. Back onto Fal Ward, same bag, same label, enhanced sense of dread. Will they cancel again? Finally I get the call to change and head up to blue bay. It’s less busy today. I’m trying not to think about the B word. My anaesthetist flies up. He’s L, a pony-tailed hippy doctor, and we have a chat about the anaesthetic and he explains in detail that he will be asking me to wake up and to consciously make the effort to breathe at the end at which point he’ll remove the tube. I like detail, and feel reassured.

Finally, I get my HCA with a folder, the final sign that it’s going ahead. He runs thought the last minute bits, name check, allergy check, date of birth, signed consent form. No danger of some imposter getting my op today, I’d probably kill.

We start our walk to the theatre waiting room. There I ask them about the cancellations. Many of the people leaving the NHS at the moment are the experienced staff, and staffing is as much a problem as the beds themselves. It’s the same in the ambulance service. Only the young and fresh can keep with the pace and the relentless pressure of under-funding and under-staffing; the whole resourcing issue that is the end result of so-called ‘efficiency savings’, known as ‘cuts’ if like me you can speak plain English.

The HCA and I are called and walk to the anaesthetics room for Theatre 6. Lots of kit, my HCA, a theatre sister, D, who likes to swim in the sea, and C the anaesthetics registrar who I discover has had an interesting career path including a spell as a GP. He’s wearing a gown in a particularly fine shade of blue, another good sign.

C is going to start by inserting an intravenous cannula. I don’t even feel it, and then notice it’s a grey, wide bore, into my hand. Any paramedic would be impressed by that. Next, however, comes an arterial line for instant monitoring of my blood pressure during the surgery. This goes into the radial artery in my left wrist. A stab of fear. I don’t mind needles usually. My left hand still isn’t entirely sure where it is, and there’s a period of struggle where I’m failing to hold my arm or hand in the right place before I remember that thanks to Hunt, while I might think it’s in one place, it’s most likely not. So I end up with a board to put my arm on.

The arterial line presents some problems because I have a small and oddly-angled radial artery. C uses more local anaesthetic each time, but I’m fretting about it, feeling afraid of the next stab although it’s perfectly bearable. More displacement fears, something to latch onto in a physical sense. After a chat with L, C tries again using ultrasound. I begin to get that faint feeling, the sicky ugh. I can hear them discussing it, it looks to be in but isn’t. I ask for a couple of minutes to get over it, which they give me. D talks more about the sea to distract me. At this point I discover that L likes to swim under the full moon at Crazywell Pool, one of my favorite wild swimming spots on the moor. I’ve got the right gang in here; but I’m still really fretful. I hate it.

L takes over the arterial line as he explains to C about the planes of the artery. I think back to all those intravenous cannulations (into the vein which is far less complicated than this) where you miss, and start to lose confidence. I had one period as a new paramedic where I felt I’d never get one in again. Then whop, in goes a difficult one, and your confidence returns. You start to feel them in three dimensions. Noddy stuff by comparison of course.

We’ve now been almost half an hour; it’s 1 o clock. I’ve enjoyed chatting with the team as they distracted and tried to relax me. It’s a new experience for me to feel so anxious about things like needles, the minor transient ache-pains that I know I have to go through. It’s just today I don’t want to. I don’t want to be here, but I know I must.

And then the atmosphere turns as L switches into professional mode to get me anaesthetised. The padded mask, quite claustrophobic and I can’t feel the oxygen coming through. that horrid curry-sauce scent that reminds me of Scottish vomit (x pints o’ Heavy, chips and curry sauce being the most usual stomach contents encountered in the pool hall I used to work in as a student). Why do masks smell like that? I take deep breaths, in and out, in and out, oxygenating ready for inubation.

The hiss of gas, the curry still, D’s face, L looking at me, his green cap has a dangly back for the ponytail and bobs wobbles as he talks; the motion is like the dippers bowing and bobbing underwater in the Tavy. The plastic insert in the ceiling pulls me, concentric circles in white. There you go Lynne…

6 thoughts on “Op Hunt saboteur: going under”

Brilliant reading Lynne, absolutely mesmerising. I sooooo hope that they have been able to deal with this bugger for you, and that eventually you can just get on with a normal life again. Whatever they’ve done it’s not affected your sense of humour and sense of what’s wrong in this crazy misplaced planet on which we live. I look forward to the next instalment…… Lots of love Gill xx